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Ataksak - Amarok 2.0 Beta 3 released

November 3, 2008 - 20:03 — nightrose

It is that time again! The time where the world seems just a little brighter and happier, the sun shines just a little warmer and even though (at least in the northern hemisphere) winter is approaching fast, people are just that little bit more friendly towards each other. Yes, this can only mean one thing: it is time for another beta of Amarok 2.

The Amarok team is pleased to announce the immediate availability of Beta 3, codename Ataksak, of the upcoming Amarok 2.0. This release is yet another significant step towards the final version. Beta 3 fixes a number of serious bugs and enhances many parts of the application. Some parts underwent significant rewrites in order to fix some deeply rooted problems. All in all, Amarok 2 is now a much more polished application.

Some of the most significant changes are:

playlist and statusbar recieved major attention

database/statistics import from Amarok 1.4

major overhaul of the Last.fm integration

sorting by year and album in the Collection Browser is possible again (small, but often requested)

shortcut to jump to current track in the playlist

many, many bugs squashed and stability fixes

Now is the time for script authors to start porting scripts. The first scripts are appearing on kde-apps.org.

Thank you to everyone who helped us with bugreports and patches. Keep them coming :)

As we're getting close to a final release of Amarok 2.0, more and more distributions offer packages in their repositories. Windows binaries are available through the KDE-on-Windows installer. So try it and tell us what you think and please consider contributing to our yearly fundraiser Roktober. Or if you are not so lucky, grab the tarball and compile it yourself:

md5sum: bad0c49818b31b2dfe283630c2a5903e

The full list of changes:

Features

More intelligent sorting of items in the collection browser, using
locale aware sorting and natural sorting for numbers. Patch by Nicholas
Wilson . (BR 154408)

Service scripts can now specify custom info for artist, album and friends
that will be shown in the playlist and other places, independetly of
their actual parent item in the service. This value is ignored if item
is not a level 0 item. Specifying these values is completely optional.

Playlists can be added using the Add Media dialogs.

Collection browser can once again sort by Year - Album.

Albums applet shows disc number separators.

Context menu and drag & drop support for the albums applet.

Added tracks count and total playlist time to the status bar.
(BR 171652)

You can now Copy To a collection, Append, and Load tracks from
the file browser's context menu.

Changes

Improved usability for the collection configuration dialog.

XSPF playlists will now attempt to apply any stored metadata to items
not owned by a service when loading. This will make many streams stored
on shutdown appear with correct metadata after a restart of Amarok.

Scripted services are now able to set the infoHtml used in the
service info applet for individual tracks.

The default lyrics script now uses the LyricWiki site, which is more
reliable and also faster than the old lyrics provider.

All services (or any other part of Amarok) can now add context
actions to any item in any collection. This is only used for the "play
similar artists from last.fm" currently, but it allows this kind of
action to be added without hardcoding it in the core. The immidiate
effect of this is that the last.fm action is now available for any
artist in any collection.

New "playground" directory added for plugins and applets that are not
yet ready for prime time.

Nonconsecutive items can now be selected and dragged around in the
playlist.

Major overhaul of playlist subsystem, including a completely new view
(even though it looks a lot like to old one). Programmers should
review the SVN commit notes to learn about other changes.

Selecting "Move to Collection" in the file browser's context menu
will now recursively include all directories within the selected items.

Selecting "Move to Collection" in the file browser's context menu
will now delete the original source files as expected.

Bugfixes

Correct scrobbling for all tracks, even last.fm streams and loved tracks
in Last.Fm streams. (BR 164156)

Files moved or organized into themselves are no longer deleted.
(BR 173341)

on my system this release isn't as stable as the second beta, which was quite good.
this release crashes sometimes on track change, and nearly everytime when i want to do something parallel, last example was listening to music and searching a file.
what did you do? is there a feature freeze already or will this be coming with the release candidates?

except of these instabilities, there are in fact many bugfixes and amarok feels better and better with every release